Elko, Aggies Hold LSU Week Press Conference
Oct 21, 2024 | Football
Texas A&M turned its attention to this weekend's matchup with No. 7/8 LSU as the Aggies held their weekly press conference on Monday inside the Kyle Field Media Center. Hear from Mike Elko, Scooby Williams, Dametrious Crownover and Bryce Anderson below.
Quotables: Mike Elko
OPENING COMMENT:
Thanks everybody for coming out.
Wrapping up the Mississippi State game, start with our players of the game. This is becoming extremely repetitive, but our lineman of the week was Trey Zuhn. Defensive lineman was Albert Regis, who again, just kind of continues to be a really, really solid anchor in the middle of our defense this year. Probably one of our most unsung standouts on the season to this point. And then Cashius Howell. I thought Cashius Howell was really disruptive. Played a good game. We asked a little bit more of him from a coverage standpoint. I thought he gave us a lot of value doing that. Offensive player of the game was Jabre Barber. Obviously his best game of the year. I thought he made a ton of really critical plays for us on third down, especially when the game was very much at stake. Scooby Williams was our defensive player of the week. I thought he really impacted the game. The interception and the 4th-and-1 were obviously two extremely critical plays that he made. And then Solomon DeShields was our special teams player of the week. And, just another example. Another kid in our program who is just continuing to fit into his role, maybe not the ideal role, maybe not the role he dreamed of. But he's going out and making impact plays to help us win football games.
So, you know, when you look back at it, we kind of talked this way after the game and I think it played out this way. Sometimes you don't have your best stuff and you've got to find a way to win. And we did. We lost the turnover battle, which is not a good recipe on the road. We didn't win the fourth quarter, which is not a good recipe for success. We had a bad two minute drive at the end of the half on defense. We had a bad four minute drive at the end of the game on offense. And still found a way. And I think that's a testament to the grit and the toughness of the group, that in that environment, you could not be playing your best football and still find a way to win. I do think there were still a lot of positives to take out of the game. I just thought in some critical moments when we could have taken control of the game we just didn't. But offensively, we still had 31 points through our first six drives. We were five of six in terms of scoring. Four of those were touchdowns. That's extremely productive. And we just didn't finish three of the last four drives, just didn't finish the way we wanted to.
Defensively, I talked about this. The first and last drive of the first half were not our best football. But I thought everything in between we played pretty well on defense and certainly limited the explosive passing game more so than some other teams had, but maybe just got a little softer in the run than we would have liked and gave up some explosive runs in the beginning of the game that we had to tighten up. I thought our red zone touchdown efficiency on defense really slanted that. It was the first time all year really where we were bad in the red zone. We gave up three touchdowns in four trips and so all of a sudden now it's a 24 point game instead of a 17 point game. And I think that plays a big difference in the outcome.
And then I thought special teams, that was probably our most solid effort. You know we maybe didn't have the standout play other than stopping the fake punt. But I think we're starting to understand the special teams game, the system a little bit. We didn't give up that big negative that we've kind of had to overcome in some of our other games. And so I thought special teams wise we took a big step forward.
And so, on next week, which is a really, really big week. My older son starts his World Series, so he's got game one and two of the World Series. My younger son is playing for the conference title, in a battle of unbeatens back in Apex, North Carolina. My daughter and wife are going to Taylor Swift in New Orleans. And so, yeah, that's probably all we got going on this week...
I joke obviously. Not about any of those things, those things are actually all real...Obviously looking ahead to LSU, it's going to be a huge challenge. It's going to be a great environment. It's going to be an opportunity for us to go out there and show we belong on this stage and take this program where we all thought we wanted it to go. It's a great, great opportunity. It's a great venue. They're a great team. We're a talented team. It's going to be a lot of fun. And so looking forward to Saturday. Looking forward to a great environment at Kyle, I know our people will show out and it'll be electric. We'll spend the week doing the best we can to go play our best football.
OBVIOUSLY LSU'S GOT A REALLY STRONG PASSING GAME. JUST FROM YOUR PERSPECTIVE, WHAT MAKES (GARRETT) NUSSMEIER SUCH AN EFFECTIVE THROWER AND PARTICULARLY (KAREN) LACY A THREAT AT RECEIVER?
Nussmeier can make every throw. And I think he's a testament to kind of doing this the right way. I think one of the things you're noticing now, three years into the transfer portal, is so many kids are jumping around. And when you're jumping around, you're not getting better. When you have to relocate, you have to reestablish yourself, you have to learn a new system, you've got to learn a new place...it's hard to improve in your first year in an uncomfortable environment. It's almost like being a freshman three straight years when you keep bouncing around. I think he has stayed the course. I think he's really comfortable in their system. I think he's grown and developed. He's gotten his opportunities over the first couple years when the opportunities presented themselves. And I think that's prepared him to come into this stage this year and really be their leader. He can throw the ball over the field. He's got a tremendous arm and he's got a lot of moxie. You can see that in him. Obviously raised in a family of quarterbacks, and that sticks out on tape. Then in terms of Lacy, he's an extremely electric dynamic receiver and he can make a ton of plays. But I also think when you look at the group, the group is so talented...we talked about this in the beginning of the year. The hardest thing is they've got a clearly established number one, but they also have three other people, including a tight end, who can flat out beat you if you don't pay them the appropriate attention too. And so it makes the passing game extremely dynamic and productive for them.
SOME PEOPLE, WHEN THE 12 TEAM PLAYOFF CAME OUT, SAID THAT IT WOULD UNDERVALUE THE REGULAR SEASON. WITH THIS GAME COMING UP, WITH SOME OF THE GAMES YOU'VE HAD, DOES THAT FEEL LIKE IT MAYBE PUNCHES SOME HOLES IN AN ARGUMENT LIKE THAT?
Yeah, for sure. I don't know that internally we ever thought that. I thought it would be the exact opposite. I thought there would be more teams playing more meaningful games. I think as you talk to your teams and your programs, you're seeing more coaches reference it. I was talking to somebody about this a couple weeks ago, one of the TV crews. When it was a four team playoff, you basically went into the season kind of prepared on how you were going to get knocked out of the playoff race early, and you had to keep going, right? And so you kind of never talked about it because you were so far removed from being in a four team playoff race. Now that you're 12, I mean, you're talking about 24, 26, 28 teams still viably alive to find a way into the 12. And so now it becomes a little bit more like, you lose a game early, you can still keep your goals, our playoff hopes are still in front of you. You see a little bit more of that verbiage and rhetoric being used. And so I think there's more teams that are still alive. I think there's probably what, eight teams in the SEC? Maybe more? That are still alive to be in the playoff. That's never really been the case in previous years. And so yeah, I think it puts a lot of magnitude on a lot of different games. You look even at like Alabama/Missouri this weekend. That's almost a similar-type game in terms of playoff importance. This game has tremendous playoff importance. And so I just think you see those more and more.
AS THE STAKES GET BIGGER AND IT GETS LOUDER, HOW DO YOU KEEP A LOCKER ROOM TO NOT FOCUS ON THE CHATTER AND TO FOCUS ON THE SIX INCHES AHEAD?
Conversation is the best you can do. I told them this. We're trying to expedite this process for ourselves. We're in a really good spot. We're in a really good opportunity. We want to take advantage of where we are. A lot of times you see, on the rise up, you have to learn through failure. We're trying to not do that, right? And so I think that's got their attention. Like teach me how to get through this, navigate this the right way, so that we don't have to go, oh okay. Well this is, and then come back next year, and then come back (next year). We don't want to be that program. We want to be the program that hits it when we have our opportunity. And so, I just think it's constant conversation about where success comes from. We spend so much time talking about where success comes from. You can spend this whole week thinking about the play you're going to make, the celebration, what you're going to look like...Or you can spend the whole week focusing on all of the things that are going to help you have success on Saturday, and it's just kind of trying to shift their eyes every single day in that lane and stay there as long as humanly possible with the strong knowledge that they're 18 to 23. It's an ongoing process for us.
COACH BRIAN KELLY SPOKE PRETTY HIGHLY OF YOU AT SEC MEDIA DAYS. JUST WHAT DOES HE DO WELL AS A HEAD COACH? AND IS THERE ANYTHING THAT YOU LEARNED DURING YOUR TIME WITH HIM?
Oh, yeah, I learned a lot. Brian's a really, really successful head coach that maybe isn't into the huge self-promotion business. He's the winningest coach in Notre Dame football history. I don't know that that's something that rolls off of everyone's tongue. He's been successful everywhere he's been. He kind of had a similar...my defensive coordinator path kind of married his head coach path, right? It started D2, worked its way all the way up through. He had success kind of everywhere he went. And so, yeah, a ton of respect for him, who he is. Certainly appreciate him giving me the opportunity he did to be the defensive coordinator at Notre Dame. And, he's a really good coach. He does a really good job getting the best out of his team.
WITH THE 12 TEAM PLAYOFF, SO MANY MORE TEAMS IN THE MIX, DID YOU LOOK AT MAYBE SIMILARITIES WITH LSU'S TEAM? THE WAY THAT YOUR GUYS PATHS HAVE GONE TO THIS POINT? AND THEN JUST HOW HAVE YOU SEEN LSU'S GROWTH AS A TEAM GETTING TO THIS POINT?
Yeah. I think eerily similar in some ways. Both had a big stage in the opener and both played a really close game all the way down to the fourth quarter and didn't make the plays at the end that they needed to be successful. And probably in some ways both got written off a little bit and then just went to work to get better and improved every week and continued true to their process and believing in who they were. And again, all of a sudden, you pick your head up and here you are. And that's usually where success comes from, when you do things like that. In terms of where they've gotten better, I don't know, those things are always hard to measure because you just kind of look at, this whole body of work that they have and you see this extremely talented team. And so I don't know that I study closely exactly where they came up short against USC versus where they didn't against Ole Miss. I just think they're extremely talented. I think they've gotten more and more comfortable on defense with the system. I think Blake Baker does a great job. And I think they're each week getting more and more comfortable in what he's asking him to do. The quarterback certainly is getting more comfortable as a starter. That was his first you know, season going into the season as the established starter. It wasn't his first start, but it was the first season he was the established starter. And so I just think it's some of the natural progression of growth you've seen from them start to finish.
4-0 IN THE SEC FOR THE SECOND TIME, YOU'VE BEEN HERE FOR SOME SEC SEASONS, WHAT'S THE CHALLENGE OF BEING ABLE TO HAVE THAT CONSISTENT START TO THE YEAR IN LEAGUE PLAY?
I think the challenge is the week in week out in this league. You cannot help but get in situations where the game's on the line coming down the stretch. And your ability to make those plays to come out on the right end of those games is everything. It's not to say we've got that recipe right or don't have that recipe right, but that's just SEC football. You see it all over this conference. It comes down to the fourth quarter, whatever it is, whoever's playing, and someone makes a play and someone doesn't and all of a sudden you get a result. And the result shifts things so drastically. But what creates the result is something really small. And so it's a hard league to navigate because of that. There's not a lot of easy paths. Going on the road in this league is tremendously challenging. No matter who. No matter where. It doesn't matter. You saw the atmosphere on Saturday in Starkville. That's just SEC football. It's a challenging road to navigate.
